1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to home wireless networking.
2. Description of the Related Art
A home network is used to provide Internet connectivity and data sharing among computing devices within a home that are connected to that network. To allow computing devices to be placed remotely from one another and/or from the network router, many home networks are fully or partially wireless. Wireless home networks typically include a wireless router that is hard wired to a modem. The modem, which is often provided by a telephone or cable company, is connected to an external network, such as the Internet, and allows information to flow between the external network and the home network. Each computing device in the home network is connected to the wireless router through a wireless network adapter that is either internal or external to the computing device.
Computing devices in the home network typically need to be configured via device drivers so that they operate as desired. Typically, such device drivers are packaged per computing device and are large monolithic pieces of software that need to be independently tracked by the user configuring the computing devices. In addition, vendors of the computing devices may provide additional software applications that expose extra functionality built on top of the client devices. Such additional software applications are also packaged per computing device and managed by the user separately.
One drawback to such a mechanism of application and driver distribution is that the user has to individually download and track the different applications and drivers related to the computing devices within the home network. In addition, the user has to manually check for updates to those applications/drivers as they become available. Such a mechanism requires the user to be heavily involved in managing the applications/drivers related to the home network, which is undesirable from a usability perspective. In addition, because the user selects the various applications that are to be downloaded, the user may not be downloading the most optimal or feature-rich applications for the particular home network.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a more efficient and effective mechanism for distributing software applications related to computing devices within the home network.